Well, I guess this isn’t a big surprise. Some time back while searching for a WordPress theme, I selected the “Photo-Diary by Sitko-Designing”. It wasn’t perfect, but I knew less than nothing about WordPress, and Photo Diary provided the look I was wanting. Mostly. The individual lack of font control was a pain, but that was resolved via a plug-in and life went on.
And then WordPress introduced the Block Editor. Photo-Diary started doing some interesting things, the most painful of which was eliminating whitespace between paragraphs. A quick e-mail to the author produced a shoulder shrug reaction in that he wasn’t planning on updating Photo-Diary to work with the new Block Editor.
The thing was twisted into working by manually inserting a space between paragraphs. This was kind of a pain, but was made a bit easier by using a reusable block. If you have noticed that the spacing was varying a bit between paragraphs, it’s because I’ve been tweaking the block.
Unfortunately the final straw in this sordid little tale is the insertion of photo galleries. I’m using FileBird to help manage the uploaded photos by organizing them into folder kinda like on your hard drive. WordPress’ file management capabilities are a bit laughable really, and you have to rely on some sort of tool to help manage the images. At this point I’ve got some 1,500 images sitting on the server, so a means to manage is required. The fly in the ointment is that images inserted into a gallery were in a pseudo random sequence . I’ve very diligent about photo filenames with sequences in a chronological order. Typically some number of the first sequence of images are attached to the bottom of the group with the rest sort of at the top. A discussion on the WordPress.org support page pointed a finger at Filebird as it brought a photo gallery functionality to the table, which I did not realize.
So I did some playing with my shadow system installed locally on a Raspberry pi without Filebird, and it showed no sorting issues. I’ve got Real Media Library on there, but imported images were sorted by filename as desired.
Installing Real Media Library on this system and giving it a go results in the same problem. So, something is definitely amiss. Why would my shadow system work with virtually the same set up and this system which doesn’t work?
What I’m getting to is I’m going to have to do a major rethink of the site. I’m probably going to have to pony up and actually buy a supported theme so that when these things happen I can get help.
The cynic in me tells me that WordPress was factored in a way to support “third-party” coders who sell add-ins and themes as there are some major holes in capability of the system by and large. Could be, who knows? At this point it doesn’t matter as it’s time to sort it all out in a less cumbersome way than I’ve been operating.
In all likelihood it will be a while (months?) before you see anymore posts. And when you do, the site will bear no resemblance to what it does now.
Stay tuned….